Originally Posted by laciemn1  I think this information can probably help some of the people on this thread.
Through a combination of hearing Steve's podcast "Overcoming Fear" and reading Quantum Leap Thinking by James J. Mape, I had an...experience the other day.
It is quite a lot of explaining. Let's start with my old feelings for my mom.
Mostly, I didn't really like my mom very much. The sound of her voice made me angry, facial expressions, and her drinking alcohol made me ESPECIALLY resentful, angry and anxious. It was so powerful that I will actually wake up out of a dead sleep, scared and angry, if anyone opens a can top pop and the tsss sound associated with opening a can of beer.
As I was reading Quantum Leap Thinking, I got to a chapter talking about negative emotions actually being little signals of something that is wrong or messed up about your beliefs. So, I thought of all the people close to me, and wrote down all the associated negative emotions. My mom was my first choice because I had the most negative emotion connected to her.
I then started thinking of specific situations that I had been angry or unhappy with my mom. I then traced the roots of all my anger back to this one place I lived when I was probably around 10 or 11 years old.
I'm about to go into extreme details.
I lived in a trailer park with my mom, who was manager of the local Waffle House, next to Janet and Tommy, then my other neighbhor was called Donna. Donna was a a drug-addicted former stripper, but she worked with my mom as a waitress at that time. I grew to become very dependent on Donna, she was sort of an older sister/friend and the only person I felt I had at that time in my life(I found out later she died from an overdose).
Janet was an alcohlic and Tommy was her husband, and my mother was having an affair with him.
My relationship with my mother at that point wasn't extremely bad. It wasn't good, I didn't respect her because she raised me a lot differently than my grandparents did. I had no rules, she showed no interest in me personally, didn't care if I went to school, she never paid any attention to me. My mother bought me a lot of things to try to make up for the fact that she would never spend any time with me. She bought me a lot of video games and brought me home milkshakes every day.
It didn't help. My mom got drunk pretty much every day when we lived next to Janet and Donna, because they would all were alcoholics. I have a lot of memories about my mom being drunk. One time, I tried to stop my mom from driving by taking the key out of the ignition and getting in the car. Well, I didn't know it then, but you could still drive. We ended up driving around and crashing in some poor old woman's yard.
My mom sent me to the door because she knew they wouldn't respond well to some drunk knocking on their door in the dead of night. I remember how ashamed I was of my mother then.
Another time that stands out in my head is when my mother and Donna left to go to the store to get some butter so we could make mac and cheese. Well, I waited around 2 hours, and I began to panic. I feared something had happened to them, I thought maybe they got into a wreck and died, I called everyone I knew and asked if they'd heard anything, I cried for a long time.
Finally, I go outside for whatever reason and I notice Donna's car parked a couple houses down. I go to ask them what happened, there's liquor in the car, they smell like liquor, they are acting retarded and don't give a damn that I had been worried about them and crying half the night. I was extremely angry at that moment.
Anyway, so my mother drinks off and on over the next 7 years or so. By the time I'm 17, I pretty much hate her from all the holidays she ruined, all the stress I'd gone through. I blamed her for most everything that was wrong with me. I blamed her for my social anxiety because we moved around so much. I blamed her for me being abnormal and poor.
So, after I discover the root of all my anger and resentment, I think about it. I think, you know, people that are alcoholics try to drown their sorrows in alcohol. It struck me as extremely sad at that moment, my anger and resentment suddenly vanished as I realized my mother was just a human being that had lost her way. She didn't have enough joy in her life to fufill her, so she had to turn to alcohol, which in reality, it only made things worse. I thought about my mother's childhood(it wasn't a happy one), how my father left her after I was created, how she had to work in jobs she hated all of her life. I concluded that my mother probably had never been geniunely happy, and it broke my heart. I then realized that I must love my mother in order to feel all of that sadness for her, and that my anger and resentment had just been a wall of some sort to block out all of the pain I felt from my childhood.
Things haven't been the same ever since that night. It was only around 3-4 days ago, but it's so different. I no longer feel hatred and bitterness when my mom does something foolish or that used to get on my nerves.
I know that's a lot to read, but maybe you guys would be interested in it. |